Sometimes called comprehensive community building, or even just community
building, comprehensive community initiatives are a relatively new trend
in community change dating back only about a dozen years.9

CCIs developed out of the perception that poverty problems are intractable
without a comprehensive and coordinated approach to rebuilding the institutions
within distressed communities. Prior to CCI, its adherents assert,
developmental and service approaches to community change were compartmentalized.
Certainly, this rings somewhat true as it has long been believed that communities
would be better served with coordinated programs (for instance, see Spergel,
1969). Kubisch, of the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Comprehensive Community
Initiatives for Children and Families, notes that CCIs are:

. . . both a reaction against recent practice in the social welfare
and economic development fields and a reformulation of earlier approaches.
CCIs seek to replace piecemeal approaches with broader efforts to strengthen
the connections among economic, social, and physical needs, and opportunities
(Kubisch, 1996, n.p.).
The CCI movement embraces a wide variety of projects and organizational
structures. Indeed, so many projects are defined as being a CCI one must
wonder if this is not an indication of confusion over which practices in
a community will achieve the results for which CCI programs aim: alleviating
highly concentrated poverty and tackling complex social problems. In other
words, if so many things can qualify as a CCI, just what are they?

In general, there are four features of the programs the CCI movement
promotes:

First, CCIs coordinate existing institutions serving the community.
Generally, the emphasis is on coordinating community development corporations (CDCs) and community-based service providers, but local government agencies
are often also included. This coordination attempts both to relate the
services these institutions provide in a more logical fashion across the
life span of participants and to confront social problems with a comprehensive
treatment of services. Coordination uses information about opportunities
in the community and planning for services and programs which social science
indicates will have "synergistic" effects (an efficient use of resources
for reducing more than one social problem such as an after school program
which reduces crime and increases literacy). Coordination, however, also
strives to assure that more areas in individuals’ and communities’ lives
— including the social, economic, community and political arenas — are
being touched by the programs.

Second, CCIs increase the capacity of community institutions. Often
this is done through improving local institutions’ credibility with and
access to outsiders and power brokers. Sometimes this also includes identifying
policies which might prevent the coordination or combination of service
providers.

In theory, by increasing the capacity of institutions and increasing
the number and kind of programs they provide, CCIs vastly expand both the
number of residents affected by local initiatives and the areas of their
lives which are included.

Third, CCIs attempt to increase both the social capital in a community
and the participation of residents in the planning and management of the
CCI. This includes many references to empowerment, and, very rarely,
a reference to politics. As will be seen below, whereas most projects labeled
CCIs rely on a form of community planning or community building to gain
community input or to develop new leadership, only a few incorporate community
organizing.

Fourth, CCIs differ from some of the other practices outlined above
in their formation and governance. CCIs, like some CDCs, attempt to
bring together many diverse non-resident players. Partnering, expanding
the definition of who the stakeholders are in a community, not only derives
from the view that poor communities do not have enough power to change
existing institutions, but also from the view that the community must be
reinterpreted to power brokers in the larger community (Brown, 1996). Through
their convening role, foundations and CCIs pitch the benefits of the area
undergoing the intervention (or subject matter for issue-based CCIs) to
those who previously could not comprehend how to interact with the community.
Thus, CCIs develop new resources and partners for collaborations.Some believe
that these collaborations can then be the source of future relations for
solving other more elusive problems such as racism (Kingsley, McNeely and
Gibson, 1997).

First, there are the community development agencies. During the same time
that CCIs first began to take shape conceptually, the late 1980s, some
CDCs began diversifying their projects. More CDCs began adding human capital
projects (e.g., job training) to their traditional physical capital projects
(e.g., housing development). Some CDCs also added participatory projects
aimed at generating resident involvement in planning and community directed
group action (e.g., neighborhood cleanups, meetings with police about foot
patrols, etc.).

As noted earlier, these changes were, in part, a response to the criticism
that CDCs had lost their community connection due to their focus on managing
housing and other physical development programs. This effort to modify
the work of CDCs dovetails nicely with the need of many CCIs to find intermediary
organizations in communities which can collaborate with outsider institutions
and also facilitate some form of community participation. Hence, many CCIs
have features similar to the community development and community building
practices. Some CCIs, such as the Comprehensive Community Revitalization
Program of the South Bronx, are focused entirely on CDCs (Spilka and Burns,
1998). In Figure 3, these actors are represented by the community development
and community building boxes.

Second, the involvement of foundations in the development of CCIs should
also be highlighted. Although local governments are involved in many CCIs,
some observers note that this interest would not exist without the contribution
private foundations bring to the table. Foundations not only provide large,
multi-year grants, they often provide technical assistance, fund evaluations
of CCIs and support national discussions and research on CCIs. Finally,
foundations are also able to play a convening role in a community which
is important for the early collaborative work between agency officials
and community-based organizations which often marks the start of a CCI.

In short, the role of foundations in the formation of the CCI movement
is similar to the role foundations played in the development of CDCs. As
with CDCs, they have funded initial trial projects and networks of CCIs.
Plus, most of the large CCIs, like many of the early large CDCs, exist
only because of foundation support. As will be discussed in more detail
below, this has two important impacts on the nature of CCIs:

First, as conveners of new relationships and projects, foundations often
form collaborative bodies to lead a CCI from the outset instead of identifying
an existing community building or community organizing project which can
grow a bottom-up CCI campaign. These collaborative bodies include government
agency staff, elected officials, corporate leaders and other "power brokers"
in addition to community residents.

Second, because community development is more closely tied to facilitating
collaborative relationships than the other practices, it is the most commonly
tapped community practice in CCIs.

Hence, CCIs bring, somewhere in the process, several other actors to the
table. CCIs develop collaborative projects (often including a governing
task force or committee) for specific programs they wish to implement.
These projects and governing bodies involve social service agency staff
and other stakeholders (such as other government officials, banks, private
corporations, etc.). These stakeholders often come to the table because
the new "synergistic" programs that foundations, policy researchers and
community-based groups provide for systems-reform and community improvement
are exciting to the stakeholders. These stakeholders, and the policy analyst/planning
community that the government and foundations bring in for planning and
evaluation, are also represented in Figure 3.

Tensions (over control of new resources, publicly rewriting the agendas
of agencies, accountability of all players in the collaborative governance,
fears of manipulation by other stakeholders, etc.) are obviously going
to result from such an arrangement and are frequently mentioned in the
literature (Aspen Institute, 1997; Chaskin and Garg, 1997). The next section
reviews how CCIs measure up against the bases identified in chapter 2.

Below, I summarize trends in the features of CCIs regarding the bases
outlined in chapter 2, with occasional examples of CCIs bucking the trends.
Of course, there is variation in the CCI practice and it is a new and evolving
field. In fact, as will be shown, it appears as if there are really two
different kinds of CCI. This will be addressed in the following section.
The comparison which follows, and is summarized in Table 5, is based on
a review of the evaluation and planning literature of CCIs. See Table 6
in Appendix A for a review of several significant CCIs compared to the
features of organizing, building and developing.

Table 5: CCIs Compared
Against the Bases

Bases

Organizing

Building

Developing

CCI

Primary Value

Participation

Leadership

Expertise

Expertise and Leadership

Nature of Public Interest in
a Community

Conflicting

Communal

Singular

Communal and Singular

Power

Agenda Setting

Agenda Planning

Pluralist

Pluralist and Agenda Planning

Nature of Social Capital

Political

Internal

Collaborative

Collaborative (weaker on Internal)

Nature of Civic Engagement

Political Activism

Engaged Citizenry

Policy Making

Policy Making (weaker on Engaged
Citizenry)

Primary Value. From the theoretical literature it is hard to discern
the primary values of CCIs. Just as it is exceedingly difficult for program
evaluators to determine how to evaluate the impacts of CCIs’ complex, ever-changing
and large service and treatment programs, it is hard to distinguish some
of the more qualitative features of CCIs. Indeed, CCIs state an interest
in all three of the values mentioned in the paper. Furthermore, they specifically
recognize that expertise from the service and social planning fields has
not been sufficient to tackle persistent poverty.

Nonetheless, it is clear from the practitioner and evaluation writings
that most CCIs rely on leadership (often at both the government agency
level and the level of community-based development and service providers)
and expertise (both for managing the CCIs and identifying what social science
concludes should work, e.g., reviewing program evaluation literature to
find effective and relevant programs) for commencing a CCI.

Participation, in the form of membership ownership, is low in CCIs compared
to community organizing. Out of 17 CCIs reviewed, Eisen (1992) found only
6 with majority resident control over the organization’s governing body.
Walsh (1997b) found that resident participation in both the Atlanta Project
and the Enterprise Foundation’s Community Building Partnership (CBP) in
Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood dropped off precipitously
after management was taken over by experts, agencies or politically appointed
leaders.

Walsh (1997b) summarizes her review of community organizing in CBP and
4 other initiatives:

CBP began with a strong partnership with BUILD, an affiliate of the
Industrial Areas Foundation — the venerable organizing powerhouse founded
by Saul Alinsky — but its organizers gradually became "advocates" more
responsible for outreach about issues on CBP’s agenda, then helping the
community set its own agenda. Several years into the project, some community
members clamored for more old-fashioned organizing, to surface residents’
desires and complaints independent of the program area outlined by CBP.
To this day, tension persists.

None of the other initiatives [reviewed] has invested heavily in organizing
(p.102).

In brief, only a few CCIs begin with the community participation and mobilization
projects of a community-based organization with experience in community
organizing and then proceed on to identifying which stakeholders will need
to be brought into a collaboration. Chaskin and Garg (1997) agree with
Walsh’s (1997b) findings that participation, a key feature of community
organizing, is weak in CCIs. They write that organizing is "often limited
to mobilizing residents to attend meetings or activities, or sharing information
through newsletters or flyers" (p.11). Annie E. Casey Foundations’ Rebuilding
Community Initiative seems to follow a model where participation through
community organizing is emphasized early on, although the same foundation’s
earlier New Futures program seemed to have followed the more top-down approach (Cippalone, 1999; Walsh, 1997a; Center for the Study of Social Policy,
1995).

Conception of Public Interest. The tendency of CCIs is to start
with collaborative bodies, and less often a single existing organization,
and expand this governing body’s capacity for community planning and resident
involvement. At the same time, they also wish to increase the number of
attachments the CCI’s organization has to external resources and collaborators.
Thus, CCIs promote a community organization, or a newly created collaborative
body of organizations, to the role of intermediary for the entire community
over an important, visible and often expensive set of programs. In other
words, the CCI is expanding the activities and relationships of the intermediary
both down into the community (through more programs and community planning)
and up out of the community (through more collaborative projects with power
brokers’ agencies, corporations, etc.).

Clearly, this places CCIs in a delicate position. Agents external and
internal to the community may have many interests that are not reconcilable.
Surprisingly, however, conflict is only rarely recognized as a healthy
part of this process. If conflict is recognized, it is viewed as something
that can occasionally be harmlessly tolerated, even though in the end consensus
must rule on the most important issues (Connell and Kubisch, 1998, p.30).
There appears to be little explicit dedication in CCIs to seeing conflicts
between interests as a point where the practice of organizing can advance
the community’s agenda — which was identified in the community building
process — over constraints or road blocks that other interests may place
on the initiative’s success. Instead, conflict is viewed as pathological
and interests for the collaborative are identified through consensus (i.e.,
communal) or through expert research into the community’s needs (i.e.,
singular).

Outliers in this matter are the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) and a few CCIs in the rural south. DSNI and the rural CCIs are very
atypical CCIs, however. The rural projects, funded by the Bert and Mary
Meyer foundation, aim to organize residents into membership controlled,
sometimes dues-based, democratic organizations which use their numbers
to influence school boards and other local government institutions. One
such project in a small town in Mississippi "waged a concerted political
and legal struggle to be incorporated, elected a mayor and city council
and began to press for services from the county and state" (Eisen, 1992,
p.13). It is telling about CCIs’ neglect of traditional organizing that
projects such as these which use public conflict are never mentioned in
the literature beyond this early study by Eisen.

DSNI, for its part, is also very different from other projects considered
CCIs. DSNI started at the resident level and rejected the collaborative
design which foundations wished to impose on the community in the beginning
(Tullos, 1996). The original design of the board, which like many CCIs
was to be a mix of various outsiders outnumbering residents, was aggressively
rejected by the community. Instead, a board with majority community control
was instituted and DSNI began a project of community building (using an
asset-based philosophy) and organizing (using door-to-door member recruitment)
to gain eminent domain authority of a large part of decaying property in
their neighborhood (Medoff and Sklar, 1994).

DSNI has been, I believe, mistakenly called a CCI. In the past it has,
like the rural organizing projects, not developed collaboration first and
participation second. Instead, DSNI focused on community mobilization to
force the city to clean up the streets and provide other services residents
identified. However, DSNI’s more recent work with the Casey Foundation
to build both stronger social service reform projects and more sophisticated
collaborations is a sign that CCIs can be built from identifying public
interests from the bottom-up (which may lead to conflict with those institutions
who are providing what these interests need) and not just from the identification
of communal interests from collaborative relationships or the singular
view of community interests on which experts focus.

Power. Discussion about "empowerment" in CCIs often seems to
preclude a more detailed discussion of power. Empowerment appears to be
defined as efficacy in coping with the factors a community faces, and not
about gaining control over these factors. "Systems reform" in CCIs refers
to improving agency delivery and design. It does not refer to the larger
systems of the local and national political economy which organizing wishes
to tackle. In other words, diagnosing ways to improve treatments or encourage
voluntary action to cope with factors causing distress, and not directly
confronting the origin of the factors, is key.

Although the political needs of residents are recognized as part of
the holistic approach of CCIs, rarely can an explicit discussion of power
be found in the literature. Exceptions in this matter, which point out
the rule, are Yates, O’Donnell and Johnson (Stone, 1996). In the published
papers from a symposium on CCIs held by the Chapin Hall Center for Children
at the University of Chicago, these three authors, out of over three dozen,
were the only ones who mentioned conflict over race or class issues in
the local power structure as something that should be encouraged at key
moments in comprehensive change practice. Unlike the other authors, they
did not view conflict over the agenda as pathological or simply an obstacle
to be overcome in the process of consensus formation.

CCIs focus more on the pluralist and agenda planning levels of power
than the agenda setting level. Since most CCIs tend to have an asset-based
philosophy of community development they use focus groups, surveys, resident
task forces and community meetings to discover relationships and resources
present in the neighborhoods which can be further developed. These discoveries,
combined with the policy analysis and program evaluation research CCIs
use, are brought to the collaborative bodies to be turned into programs.
Indeed, one way CCIs bring outsiders into the collaborations is through
the presentation of these innovative ideas and research. In other words,
of the many actors from which a community needs to draw attention, CCIs
focus on developing agendas with external actors through research and researching
ideas (pluralism) rather than generating power to set the agenda based
on the interests of the community.

Social Capital. Social capital is a major topic of discussion
for CCIs, yet the emphasis is mostly on the collaborative (or bridging)
and internal natures of social capital discussed in chapter 2. Like community
building, CCIs focus on community relationships and local solutions to
problems, but they do not do so to the degree that they ignore the need
for working with service delivery and outside assistance. Projects with
external agents and institutions are a source of opportunity for collaboration
and building of relationships across class and race lines. However, due
to the paucity of race, class and political power discussions in the CCI
literature, it is not surprising that the political problems resulting
from collaboration between groups — see the summary of de Souza Briggs
comments above — are not discussed.

To review, collaborations between power brokers and weak community can
mask with a false consensus important conflicts between communities over
which the weaker community will lose out (see also Smock, 1997). Thus,
by focusing on internal social capital, which is focused on local solutions,
and collaborative social capital, which focuses on partnerships between
the community and outside agents, to the exclusion of recognition of the
political nature of social capital, communities in CCIs can not always
work with their powerful partners to achieve accountability on, or even
address, the larger issues in the political economy.

Fishman and Phillips (1993) note that collaborations can have severe
problems when they can do nothing about the political changes which influence
the actors or institutions with which they work or which constitute part
of the collaboration:

One [CCI] respondent [in our interviews] noted: "When city political
leadership changes, it’s like staring over." Another commented, "Changes
in the political landscape create real problems. Right now there is no
coherent leadership or vision in our city" [with which to collaborate]
(p.21).
In Atlanta, for instance, corporations provided senior staff with time
to be involved in neighborhood projects, but were not held accountable
for engaging in the job creation strategy which was identified as essential
to moving communities out of their dependence on services (Walsh, 1997b
p.57). By focusing on collaboration from the start, communities may not
have the chance to develop sufficient political capital to participate
more equally with partners in the collaborative bodies.

Civic Engagement. Increasing civic engagement is to be a hallmark
of CCIs. However, it appears that on our dimensions for civic engagement,
most CCIs stick largely with prescribing a policy making role for residents
(Sviridoff and Ryan, 1996 p.24). Many CCIs, for instance, have a governance
structure relying on having powerful actors from agencies at the table,
often outnumbering community residents (Eisen, 1992; Jenny, 1993; Walsh,
1997b). Those which do not use such a structure rely on focus groups, surveys
or annual neighborhood meetings for another sort of policy making.

The engaged citizenry dimension seems to be such a diffuse cause for
CCIs to directly engage in, especially with population sizes that are much
larger than those normally used in community building practices, that CCIs
can only approximate the practice of community building through a sustained
repetition of planning and re-planning. Although CCIs may have very public
campaigns and community meetings, these are not the same as developing
a vital set of constant and frequently repeated interactions.

Thus, it seems that this engaged citizenry will only secondarily come
out CCIs as a result of the relationships developed in specific community-based
programs. For instance, an increase in mobilizing volunteers for community
cleanups, asset surveys and task forces is something CCIs can, and some
do, constantly repeat. However, the increased engagement that might come
about as a result of there being more social networks, requires a larger
commitment to very many small scale community building exercises, something
only a minority of CCIs seem to engage in (often only as a program done
with youth). Less apparent still, is how CCIs engage citizens in political
affairs. The only brief references to such work are voter registration
drives on lists of projects in which CCIs have engaged (Jenny, 1993). Thus,
the primary role of the citizen in CCIs is policy making, with a weaker
emphasis –– when compared to community building –– on developing an engaged
citizenry.

To recapitulate: table 5 summarized this comparison of CCIs against
the bases for distinguishing between community change practices. Generally,
CCIs merge some features of the community development and community building
practice, but most lack the features of community organizing.

It should be noted that there appears to be two different types of CCIs.
First, there are those that move from the collaboration between foundations,
agencies, corporations, and community-based development and service organizations
towards community planning. This type represents the majority of CCIs found
in the literature reviewed (see table in Appendix A). Second, there are
CCIs which start with community building and organizing and build up to
a collaborating role with external actors with the assistance foundations
provide. This second type of CCI is what the Annie E. Casey Foundation
in its Rebuilding Community Initiatives program is encouraging after using
the first type in its earlier New Futures program (Cippalone, 1999).

As shown above, the dimensions of the five bases which are associated
with organizing are missing from this first type of CCIs. (The second type
is too new to have generated sufficient literature for review.) Below,
I discuss problems which exist for CCIs which do not use organizing.

Because CCIs share many features with community development and, to
a lesser degree, community building, it is not surprising that they can
be critiqued as having the same weaknesses which those practices have:

Insufficient Power. CCIs which focus on collaboration foremost
in their evolution will not have the political "leverage" or "authority"
to change large systems. The Center for the Study of the Social Policy’s
review (1995) of five CCIs in the Annie E. Casey’s Foundation New Futures
program found that:

[CCI] collaboratives must move beyond the stage of "cooperative" organizations
that simply coordinate activities and oversee the distribution of money.
The New Futures experience suggests that political power is necessary to
handle competing and conflicting agendas, resolve controversy, and ultimately
hold organizations and individuals accountable for meeting the goals and
expectations for the [CCI]. . . (p.95).
Likewise, Walsh (1997b) noted that the Atlanta CCI sponsored by the Carter
Center was unable to secure sufficient participation by corporations for
neighborhoods around employment issues even though this was identified
early on as an important issue. Numerous organizing networks around the
country currently waging campaigns around jobs and wages (see http://www.acorn.org
for a summary). CCIs which focus on building organizing into their work
early on will be better positioned to both ask the question Richard Taub
(1996) encourages: "what if everyone had a job?" and elicit support from
the public and private sectors for commitments to job and wage growth.10

In short, as with community development and building, organizing can
provide CCIs with the needed clout to press the communities’ agenda forward
and hold actors in the collaborative bodies accountable.

Avoiding Conflict. In their recent book, Ross Gittel and Adis
Vidal (1998) follow the application of a consensus organizing model (i.e.,
one that avoids conflict) in several cities. Consensus organizing, developed
by Michael Eichler, focuses on putting groups together across class, race
and other divides (a common collaborative feature of CCIs).11
In order to justify using a form of organizing that downplays conflict
within communities the authors spend some time attacking more traditional
community organizing methods. Both the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)
and Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) come
under fire in the book for focusing too much on conflict:

Although in the short run, benefits may be derived by a disempowered
group through conflict organizing, long-term conflictual organizing efforts
could lead to social and political division, harm the ability of different
groups to work together, limit the amount of funding and access to outside
resources, and be detrimental to larger community and societal interests
(Gittell and Vidal, 1998, p.52).
However, Gittel and Vidal have, in turn, come under attack for their desire
to sidestep political conflict in comprehensive initiatives. Garland Yates
(1998), of the Anne E. Casey Foundation’s Rebuilding Community Initiative,
notes in a review of Gittel and Vidals’ book:
The authors are either being inflammatory or don’t know what they
are talking about. In the Southwest, the IAF got drinking water into desperate
barrios and today works with 150 public schools. Banks that ACORN fought
for years over redlining are now major partners in its loan-counseling
program. These aren’t short-term accomplishments. And the groups’ confrontational
approach didn’t forever alienate government and the private sector (p.31).
Examples of the success of a community organizing tradition which strategically
uses conflict can be found in Michael Katz’s history of social welfare
in the United States In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (1996). Katz’s
review of twentieth century welfare finds that the community action plans
of the 1960s, including those of independent movements such as the National
Welfare Rights Organization (which used confrontational tactics and trained
many staff who still work as senior staff in community organizing), contributed
the following:

"redefined the nature of poverty as partly a consequence of powerlessness,
and the prerequisites of reform as including local participation,"

"energized and legitimized nascent, grass-roots social action,"

challenged exclusion from the policy-making process,

created an avenue for the development of new political leaders (p. 269).

In their famous study of community action programs Peter Marris and Martin
Rein (1973) likewise note that many anti-poverty programs failed because
of their inability to cope with conflict. Professional staff found conflict
to be pathological and thus could not overcome the fact that change is
often a battle over resources. Reformers who wished to change services
found they needed to change policies. This, the authors noted, pulls actors
in at least three competing directions: action for structural reform, political
accommodation and the pursuit of academic knowledge or evaluation (pp.
54-55).

As Martin and Rein note in their conclusion, it is not enough for experts
or advocates to merely have better or new information or services. They
must also be able to secure attention to it (p.280). This is what I have
been calling here the agenda setting nature of power. For Martin and Reins,
the inability of the poor to communicate to the political structure through
informal means, forces them to seek redress through also pushing for reform
of formal (political) channels (p.279).

Gittell and Vidals’ interpretation of traditional community organizing
as counter-productive epitomizes a trend common in writings about change
methods: differences between approaches are zero-summed. In other words,
the differences between various social change methods are highlighted and
used to assert that one method is superior to another. It has been difficult
to find commentators who believe that differences between methods do exist,
but that different methods must be used if a truly comprehensive approach
to community change is to be undertaken. If Martin and Rein are correct,
that efforts at significant change require actors to operate in different
modes, then finding ways these different modes can function together, or
at least simultaneously, is a problem apparently still needing to be solved.
As noted above, organizing can shore up the ability of internal social
capital to survive the conflict partnering with powerful actors can bring
about.

Localism. Finally, organizing networks can provide CCIs with
a solution to their lack of involvement in regional or national affairs.
Smock (1997) notes that inner-city problems are not resolvable with the
resources that city-based actors can provide alone. Specifically, Bhargava
(1998b) notes that only through working on a regional, state and federal
level can inner-cities and inner-suburbs gain enough clout to "counterbalance
weathy, exurban interests" (p.7). As mentioned above, many organizing networks
have, or are developing (see Bhargava 1988b), regional, state-wide and
national ties to politics. These coalition formation projects, which often
includes churches, labor unions and unaffiliated community organizations,
could offer CCIs the opportunity to expand their vision beyond just local
solutions to nationally induced problems.

The final chapter shall discuss some ways that CCIs can incorporate
these practices, particularly the elements of organizing.